David Szalay - London and the South-East

Joan had answered the door — appearing to Paul first as a tall, wavering, marigold shape in its frosted-glass panels. Her smile was sunny and spontaneous, her hair pale greying gold, her face strong-featured and handsome — and Paul saw immediately where Heather took her slightly thick features from, though in her mother they were more successful, more well proportioned perhaps, or more fully and easily occupied. They shook hands in the narrow hall, and he took off his jacket. Perhaps her tallness had something to do with it — Heather had not inherited that. Mike Willison was shorter than his wife. A lively, paunchy man, with blue eyes, he came into the hall wearing a novelty apron, its design based on Michelangelo’s David , openly impatient to see his daughter’s ‘other half’. He shook Paul’s hand enthusiastically and said, ‘Hi, Paul. We’ve heard a lot about you.’ Then they went into the lounge. Paul had hoped that Heather would be there. She was not. There was only a small, blond child, hiding most of himself behind the settee’s low velveteen arm, and staring at them with eyes as blue as his grandfather’s. He did not say hello to Paul, despite Mike’s entreaties and the fact that Paul had said hello to him, addressing him, with awkward embarrassment, as if he were an adult — almost extending a hand for him to shake, and saying, ‘Hello, Oliver. How are you?’

‘He’s just shy,’ said Joan, smiling. ‘What do you want to drink, Paul? Heather’ll be down in a minute. She’s upstairs with Marie.’ Paul noticed that she was nervous, and when Mike said, in a loud voice, ‘I’ll get the drinks, I’ll get them,’ and went into the kitchen, she lit a cigarette and offered him one, which he took, though it was a Silk Cut Ultra and smoking it seemed to him like inhaling through a hollow tube. ‘Let’s go outside,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t smoke round the kids, should we?’ And she smiled again. With an uneasy look at Oliver, who had not moved and was still watching him, Paul followed her into the garden. Like the house, it was tidy and well arranged. ‘This is nice,’ he said, self-consciously taking in the minuscule lawn, the water feature, the table and chairs; a garden that refused to acknowledge its own smallness, adopting instead — to Lilliputian effect — the airs of a spacious acre. ‘Very nice.’ And it was at that moment that, visibly startling him, the first jumbo jet appeared, shockingly low in the sky overhead. Humbled by its noise, he stared at it in awe as it powered over. When it had passed, and no longer obliterated their voices, he found himself laughing nervously, and Joan smiled and shook her head, as if to say, ‘I know, I know.’

It was strange for him to see Heather holding Marie, who at the time was a pale, plump toddler, still in diapers. ‘Hi,’ he said, making an effort to seem normal. ‘We’re just having a look at the lovely garden.’ Heather nodded. He saw that she was much more nervous than he was, which immediately made him feel less nervous himself. ‘You must be Marie,’ he said. And smiling at the child, he took her tiny, dimpled hand and gave it a jocular shake. She seemed intrigued, but after a moment turned away from him and pressed herself into her mother’s breasts. Paul said, ‘I met Oliver a minute ago.’ Heather looked at him with a hard, intense expression, an expression that he did not understand — they had only known each other a few months — but what had been near-panic in her when she stepped into the garden was to some extent, it seemed, defused.

It was an English barbecue. There were sausages and burgers and minted lamb kebabs. Australian wine and Belgian lager. It was not cold, but the sky was solidly overcast. They talked about house prices. Mike was very pleased with how little the house had cost him because of its proximity to the airport — ‘I can drive to work in five minutes!’ — and insisted, quite hotly in the face of very tentative scepticism from Joan — scepticism anticipated in fact, because she had hardly started to speak when he interrupted her — that they did not mind the noise. ‘You just don’t notice it after a while. You really don’t.’ ‘Then why are there always those people going round with microphones?’ she asked. He waved this away. ‘The thing is,’ she said earnestly, turning to Paul, ‘you just can’t let it get to you. If you let it get to you, if you become obsessed with it, it becomes a nightmare. Doesn’t it? You hear about people who just crack up .’ Paul nodded seriously, and wondered, with a sudden flutter of panic, if they knew of his own ‘crack-up’. The previous November he had met the hard floor of the plummet that had started with the dissolution of Northwood. He had stopped turning up to work, and then stopped leaving his flat entirely, when even a trip to the shops was full of indefinable terrors. And when his brother Chris, over from Rotterdam, found him behind the drawn, dusty velour of the living-room curtains, he had insisted on taking him to a doctor. The doctor had put him on Felixstat.

They were talking about the awfulness of public transport, and when Mike expressed surprise that Paul had come on the Piccadilly Line, Joan said, with motherly vehemence, ‘Don’t be silly! He wanted to enjoy a drink.’ They were all quite tipsy, even a bit squiffy — the Famous Grouse had been brought out for the gentlemen — by the time Mike started to show off his knowledge of aircraft noise. Later, he and Paul, Heather and Oli went for what he called a ‘yomp’ on the heath, which was low-lying, with cracked concrete paths and a derelict atmosphere. The planes went over steadily from the airport’s implied location to the west. When Paul put his arm round Heather, she seemed to stiffen — perhaps aware that Oliver, who was walking with Mike a little way ahead, kept turning to look at them — and after a minute or two, without either of them saying anything, he let her go. Some people went past on horseback, and Mike, who was an enthusiastic student of local history, told Paul that in the olden days the major road into London from the west had struck across the heath, which was notorious for bandits and highwaymen — which is, he informed him, why one of the highwaymen in Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem is called ‘Hounslow’. People used to stop for the night, Mike went on, at a coaching inn nearby, the Crown, and continue on to London in the morning. They wandered through the nature reserve, and when they returned to the house — Joan was in the kitchen reading the Mail on Sunday — they had tea, and sat in the low-ceilinged lounge with the telly on.

Opposite Paul on the tube as it travelled through the long dusk of that Sunday in July were two JAL stewardesses, one Japanese, the other Scottish. They looked exhausted, had obviously just flown in from Tokyo or somewhere. Their suitcases were small, mere overnight bags; and their looks — the Japanese girl flat-faced, her legs short and plump, her hair pure black, and the Scot tall, blonde and pale-eyed, with a prominent nose — seemed designed to emphasise how far apart they had started life, how infinitesimally unlikely it was that they would one day sit together on a suburban train in London making tired small talk. Paul had been thinking about fate as he waited on the empty platform at Hounslow Central, and when, sitting down in the train, he noticed the stewardesses, they seemed set before him as a living embodiment of his thoughts. Made unusually pensive by the afternoon’s drinking, and the quiet melancholy twilight of the station platform (the lights had just flickered on, turning the surrounding sky a deeper evening blue), he had been thinking how easily he might not have been there, in the extreme west of London, where London finally ends, waiting for the train which eventually pulled in with a protracted sigh. He found it frightening to think how easily he and Heather might not have met; how easily either of them might have ended up somewhere other than Archway Publications. Nothing is fated, he thought, but most things are so improbable that once they have happened it seems they must have been.